a blessing for clarity

on the celtic tradition of blessing poetry

“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.” - James Hillman

This quote by James Hillman alongside John O’Donohue’s book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us, have become a companion over the last few months. For me, the art of offering blessing is non-denominational, it calls to mind an image of a hearth in mid-winter, firelight dancing on a dirty, weathered face and words that reach back to a time when history was held in story.

Indeed, the art of blessing originates in pre-Christian culture. It’s an oral tradition steeped in animism, relationship, soul, poetics of place, and the human desire to bridge what is immanent and transcendent.

A blessing holds at its core a sense of magnetism. It says to the receiver help me close this circle. The one that starts with you, moves through me, and ends with you again. I imagine the ouroboros, a blessing eats its tail, it regenerates through the act of being received and it dies as it is released. In the receiver something new emerges and that something makes its way out into the world, reborn.

Perhaps the art of blessing is not extraordinary. It is only as profound as the profane is sacred. Which is to say, there is something wild and wondrous about the the simplicity of words, of kindness, of opening a door to the divine through the act of passing words from one heart to another. To offer words and care is the most ordinary thing we can do. And yet, we have largely lost touch with the intimacy of presence, connection, and love for that space between which someone ends and you begin.

A blessing evokes a privileged intimacy. It touches the tender membrane where the human heart cries out to its divine ground. - John O’Donohue

This meditation on blessing has unexpectedly resulted in a collection of blessing poems, I aim to release them one by one in no certain order from Summer Solstice until August 1. As always, if this stirs anything in you, I invite you to leave a note. The comment section is the liminal place where we may meet.

May these blessings meet you exactly where you are. May you see something of yourself in the words: something right, something good. And may you find a moment, no matter the history, no matter the pain, to offer a flower, a feather, a stone placed at the edge of a body of water, as a thank you to your own lineage, for the words that live in your body as history and memory.

A Blessing for Uncertainty

May you learn to sit quietly with uncertainty.

May the winds of knowing show you

what you have yet to understand about the world.

May the disquiet of choice—the terror of the unlived life

beckon to you with wild, windswept arms

so you may know the wisdom of her embrace.

May you sit at the belly of a river and share all your uncertainties

May the answer you need but perhaps not want

come to you exquisitely and without doubt.

May you let the river show you what its like to flow

to carve out a passage over time

and to remember you are not alone in this wild world.

May you hold the sacredness of uncertainty like a love letter

from all the ones who came before you— who walked and sang across timelines

and continents — and made one thousand choices

that resulted in your becoming.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash